Yasunao Tone passed away at a New York hospital on May 12, at the age of 90, as reported by The New York Times.
Back in his university days at Chiba in Tokyo, he dove into surrealist and dadaist books, while also jamming on the saxophone with experimental groups; after graduating, he and friends like Mieko Shiomi and Takehisa Kosugi started Group Ongaku, which would later be known for shaking up the art and music scene. Later, Tone made the big move to New York in the early ’70s, where he kept pushing boundaries with glitchy sounds and wild multimedia projects, often working alongside Yoko Ono and even collaborating with Merce Cunningham’s dance company, where Kosugi eventually became director.
His radical ideas about music, which he called “Anti-Music” in a 1961 essay, were all about making music less mysterious and more open to everyone—he once said, “We use a kind of technique that can be used by any lay people. It doesn’t require any special training. That is essentially a Fluxus philosophy.” Tone’s obsession with glitches wasn’t just for show; in the 1980s, he started scratching CDs and messing with electronics, which made people see digital music in a totally new way.
Fans sometimes wonder how someone comes up with such wild ideas.
By the time the 1990s rolled around, his noisy, unpredictable records were a step ahead of what labels like Warp and Mille Plateaux would soon be doing; his 1997 album Solo for Wounded CD is still talked about by people who love experimental sound. Even in his later years, Tone never stopped experimenting—he put out two long pieces in 2017, AI Deviation #1 and #2, where he used artificial intelligence to twist his music even further.
